Friday, March 18, 2016

Oh What a Tangled Web…

The official data on both unemployment and consumer price
inflation suggest the Fed has met its policy objectives and should not be
hesitant to raise rates.Of course, when
they increased rates by a measly 0.25% in December, the markets went haywire.

Madam Chair, as you know, inflation
has gone up the last two months. We had another strong jobs report. The
tracking forecasts for GDP have returned to two percent. And yet the Fed stands
pat while it's in a process of what it said at launch in December was a process
of normalization.

So I have two questions about this.
Does the Fed have a credibility problem in the sense that it says it will do
one thing under certain conditions, but doesn't end up doing it? And then,
frankly, if the current conditions are not sufficient for the Fed to raise
rates, well, what would those conditions ever look like?

Yellen responds with 261 incomprehensible words (Zero Hedge
counted, I didn’t).After the video clip
of this Q&A, CNBC went to an exchange between the aforementioned Liesman
and Rick Santelli.

It should be explained: Santelli is as close as CNBC dares
get to calling BS on just about every government manipulation.Liesman might as well be a Fed mouthpiece.

With that:

Santelli: Steve, could you
understand any of it? Any of it seriously? Just a yes or no.

Liesman: Not much, it was not
precisely responsive to the question I asked.